The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes - "Secret Invasion"Review

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"When all this is over, I'm gonna get a T-shirt made."

By Jesse Schedeen

Warning: full episode spoilers ahead.

The Skrull invasion storyline finally wrapped up in this week's installment of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Unlike the Secret Invasion comics, at least the show knew to quit while it was still ahead. This was an enjoyable enough finale episode, even if it suffered from some of the same problems as last week's "Infiltration."

Continuing from last week, the Skrulls rolled out their full invasion plans, with the impostor Captain America leading the charge and working to pacify Earth's population. The episode started out with a neat, parallel storytelling approach, showing the unfolding chaos on S.W.O.R.D.'s Damocles base, A.I.M. headquarters, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. No acronym was safe. And just as with Ms. Marvel last week, Maria Hill was the unexpected breakout character in this episode. Hill had the chance to exercise her bad-ass side and get in a few memorable one-liners. At this point, anything the series can do to capture the smart, syncopated banter of Joss Whedon's Avengers can only help the series' popularity.

Where "Secret Invasion" faltered somewhat was in its lack of scale. I complained last week about how "Infiltration" did a poor job of depicting an epic battle for control of an entire country. Individual character battles were entertaining, but the "war" never felt like more than a small skirmish involving a few dozen characters. "Secret Invasion" played out in pretty much the same fashion. If this episode is to be believed, the Skrulls' entire invasion force consisted of about half a dozen Super-Skrulls and a handful of grunts to fill out the ranks. The characters occasionally alluded to other cities being invaded simultaneously, but we never saw any action outside the confines of New York and Washington.

Not to mention that the Super-Skrulls themselves were fairly underwhelming to watch in battle. As cool as it is to see an alien super-soldier with the combined powers of several X-Men, that matters little if powers don't result in an epic fight scene. Who would have expected that a Skrull imbued with the collective fighting skills of Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Iron Fist would merely stand in place while Wasp blasted him into unconsciousness?

In the end, maybe it's unfair to expect epic brawling when the writers only had one episode to work through the conflict. And to be fair, there were plenty of enjoyable moments to be had in "Secret Invasion" - Maria Hill jump-starting Tony's heart a la the first Iron Man movie, Thor's long-awaited return (complete with new costume), and the battle between Caps chief among them. It just would have been nice to see a global invasion that actually felt global in scale. For that matter, it would have been nice if the Skrulls had been meticulous enough in their planning to account for the possibility that a handful of costumed heroes might actually decide to fight them.

But ultimately, these same complaints can and were lodged against the original Secret Invasion comic. In the case of that series, the fallout was arguably more interesting than the story itself. Earth's Mightiest Heroes certainly isn't going to be venturing into anything as grim as Dark Reign. However, the final scene made it clear that Cap will be feeling the effects of the failed invasion for some time, and that should lead to some interesting character work in the near future. And the EMH debut of Spider-Man.